Grid Computing News : QuIC Uses Grid to Speed Up Financial Apps

QuIC Financial Technologies is using grid technology to accelerate its risk management, pricing and financial analytics solutions. Using technologies from Intel and DataSynapse, the company said it boosted the performance of its Integrated Market and Credit Risk solutions. By running Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors on GridServer software from DataSynapse, QuIC said it "achieved extremely fast calculation time" for its Unified Market and Credit Risk Solution. The portfolio benchmark, which included credit derivatives, interest rate derivatives, equity derivatives and FX options, was calculated within 40 minutes, and performance metrics based on accuracy, reliability and interoperability were improved. Incorporating the technologies from both Intel and DataSynapse allowed us to accelerate the calculation time without sacrificing the end results." To improve the reliability of the large-scale calculations, QuIC ran the tests on DataSynapse's GridServer software, a service execution platform that dynamically scales enterprise application services based on performance and business requirements.... read more

Grid Computing News : Platform Overhauls HPC Management Strategy

Platform Computing has been busy honing its high-performance computing management strategy with a suite of products aimed at cluster and grid computing environments. The Platform Manage suite includes Platform Manager (formerly known as Scali Manage), Platform RTM, Platform Analytics and Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO). The company's existing suite of products, now called Platform Accelerate, includes Platform LSF and Platform Symphony for accelerating compute and data-intensive applications. Platform says the two suites "comprise the fundamental HPC management software needed by enterprise users to develop and run applications and manage HPC environments." The offerings help customers deploy, administer, track, report, monitor, provision and manage compute resources and applications, the company said, adding that it plans to offer a range of software aimed at industries such as electronics, industrial manufacturing, financial services, life sciences, oil and gas, and government and education. Platform Manage and Platform Accelerate are integrated solutions, but individual products can be adopted separately or in combination to meet customer requirements.... read more

Grid Computing News : Euro Researchers to Showcase Grid Projects

The BEinGRID initiative is drawing attention from top businesses interested in the use of grid solutions, utility-like models, and enterprise computing. It’s the European Union’s largest project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) research body. The project, which has been running since June 2006, is organizing an event that will be attended by big names from both sides of the Atlantic. The research project will be showcasing the most relevant results from 18 pilot implementations that are employing grid technologies in practical, innovative and profitable ways within a number of economic sectors -- including those not traditionally associated with grid, such as filmmaking and architecture, as well as advancing capabilities in the industries already associated with the technology, such as finance, chemistry and computational fluid dynamics. The opening keynote presentation will be delivered by Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO of Amazon.com, together with Diego Pavia, CEO Atos Origin Iberia.... read more

Grid Computing News : Cloud Computing: Hot Air or Killer App?

Cloud computing has become a huge buzz-phrase in the past few months, but you'd be forgiven for not knowing what the term really means. Both imply data centers filled with computing resources available over the network, so are they, in fact, the same thing. You pay for what you consume, without worrying about how where it comes from or how much is available. Customers create their own Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) containing an operating system, applications and data, and they control how many instances of each AMI run at any given time. "Cloud-based computing is a type of IT service usually delivered over the Internet, but the defining characteristic is scale — the ability to service millions of users," said Matt Cain, a research vice president at Gartner.... read more

Grid Computing News : Peer Network Tests 'Real World' Site Performance

The new e-commerce site you launched looks great and you got great comments from beta testers. So why isn't it getting the traffic you expected. There are many Web site performance measurement tools, but they don't all measure the so-called "last mile" or performance at specific endpoints, i.e. Enter Gomez, which has quietly grown its peer network measurement solution to over 40,000 users worldwide. Like other Web performance companies, Gomez has a distributed set of test nodes that measure Internet backbone performance, but the company said its additional Gomez Peer Community is the only global Web site monitoring network made up of real online users.... read more